Demystifying LEP and Title VI: what your agency needs to know

If your agency receives federal funding, as most transportation, infrastructure and municipal agencies do, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to you. For people with limited English proficiency (LEP), it shapes how you share information about your projects and how residents can take part. Getting it wrong is a legal and financial risk, not only a matter of good practice.

What Title VI requires

Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in any program that receives federal financial assistance. In Lau v. Nichols (1974), the Supreme Court treated a failure to address language barriers as national origin discrimination under Title VI, because language is closely tied to national origin.

For years, Executive Order 13166 (2000) built on that ruling. It required federal agencies, and the organizations they fund, to take reasonable steps to give LEP residents meaningful access to their services and programs.

What changed in 2025

In March 2025, Executive Order 14224 named English the official language of the United States and revoked Executive Order 13166. The Justice Department has since withdrawn its own LEP guidance, and other federal agencies are reviewing theirs.

Title VI itself has not changed. It is a law passed by Congress, and an executive order cannot repeal it. What has changed is the detailed federal guidance on how to meet it. Before you change your program, check three things:

• Your grant agreements and assurances. The terms you signed may still name LEP plans or specific guidance.
• Your funding agency’s current rules. Circulars and guidance from your federal funder, such as the FTA or FHWA, may have been updated, withdrawn or left in place.
• State and local requirements. Some states and cities have their own language-access laws, which federal changes don’t affect.

Keep following the previous guidance

Our advice is simple: keep doing what the earlier guidance asked, even where it is no longer required. Residents who don’t speak English well are still affected by your projects, and they still deserve a say in them. Title VI still prohibits national origin discrimination, and the earlier guidance remains the clearest, best-tested way to show you take that seriously.

Above all, it is the right thing to do. A notice nobody can read doesn’t inform anyone.

The four parts of a language-access program

The earlier guidance built language access on four practical steps:

1. Assess the need. Use census and local data to find out which languages are spoken in the area a project affects, and how often residents are likely to come into contact with it. This is often called the four-factor analysis.
2. Write a plan. A written language-access plan sets out how you will provide translation and interpretation, and who is responsible for it.
3. Translate vital documents. Applications, public notices and complaint forms go into the languages your residents need.
4. Train your staff. Front-line staff learn to recognize when someone needs language help and how to get it quickly.

How many languages?

There is no single federal number. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2005 guidance set out a “safe harbor”: if you translate vital documents into each language spoken by 5% or 1,000 people of the affected population, whichever is fewer, you are presumed to meet the written-translation requirement. Large metropolitan agencies often end up working in a dozen languages or more.

Check whether your funding agency still points to that standard. Even where it no longer applies, it remains a practical, defensible way to decide which languages a project needs.

Why it matters beyond compliance

A strong language-access program avoids complaints, audits and the risk of losing funds. It also builds trust. When residents can talk to your agency in the language they are most comfortable with, more of them come to meetings, answer surveys and give the kind of specific feedback that makes a project better.

Agencies that invest in language access tend to hear from more of their community, earlier, which makes for fewer surprises at the end of a project.

Getting started

Whether you need a language-access plan from scratch, a review of the one you have, or translation and multilingual hotlines for a major project, we can help. Our founder has led public involvement on more than 57 infrastructure projects, and our public participation team translates documents into 16 languages.